After almost 11 years in mobile content and advertising, I think I can finally stop apologizing about mobile ad spend. No longer will I endure the the snide question: “Is THIS the year of mobile, Nevins?” I was definitely too early – which is the same as being wrong – but I was able to peek around the corner a little earlier than some. The insights that peek provided helped me help a few companies convert very well on the mobile opportunity. Maybe I was prescient? More likely, I was just lucky. Now I’m wondering: What’s the next thing?

Here are some charts on mobile ad spend in case you still haven’t gotten the message yet. If you still don’t believe me, there’s nothing more I can do 😉

We just launched our PageGrabber X product at Undertone. It’s a big upgrade to our PageGrabber high-impact desktop unit we launched in 2010. Built in HTML5, PageGrabber X serves on all devices from a single creative build. It dynamically changes size, features, and functionality to deliver an optimum experience across each device. And the ad experience is enhanced with our suite of creative features that can be tailored to each device, including video, photo galleries, animations, sliders, social media integrations (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest), click-to-call functionality, and countdown clocks.

PageGrabber X (or PGX as we’ve been calling it at the office) is our second proprietary responsive high impact unit following ScreenShift which we launched last June. ScreenShift has been hugely successful for Undertone, and the early response to PageGrabber X has been extraordinary out of the gate. Clients have always been excited about PageGrabber and are eager to take this experience across screens. Boom.

I’ve been in mobile for almost nine years and have always been keenly interested in how context can be affected by mobile. At a minimum, I’m interested in things like:

The location in which mobile is used

How location can affect user’s modality (ranging from passive to task-driven activities).

Which content people choose to consume

How much content they will consume

User’s receptivity to disruptive marketing messages

The location awareness of the device and the opportunities that creates in terms of relevance of display advertising, search results, etc.

I’m privy to many of the question asked by agencies about geo-targeting. It has been very common over the last year for our team to be asked “Can you do geo-fencing?” This question often comes without the benefit of an understanding of the true client objective. More often than not, we are not in the room when this idea first came to mind and are not in a position to challenge many of the assumptions that drove it. Naturally scale is always an issue to consider with any targeting.

I like to go further and challenge the objective in the first place. A lot of the questions about geo-fencing ignore some basic things we already understand about consumers, how they move through the marketing funnel and the timing involved. For example, does a person move from consideration to intent just because they are 100 feet from a store? Can you affect this timing with a display ad on mobile? Is that ad best served in the same DMA, perhaps 8 hours before the consumer is front of the store? How does the process change when considering big ticket vs. impulse purchases? Much to consider.